There's a trap that's been quietly reshaping agencies and brands for years, and it starts with something that sounds completely unimpeachable. “Evidence based.” Nobody in a meeting is going to argue with that phrase. Of course you work from evidence, of course you measure what’s working.
But if your evidence is really just optimising against the idiosyncrasies of an algorithm, Meta’s, Google’s, or whichever platform happens to be paying the bills this quarter, you’re not learning about your own business any more, you’re being conditioned by another interest. An algorithm has an agenda, or rather the corporation behind it does, and slowly, without anyone ever quite deciding it should happen, it starts choosing what you do, how you say it, which ideas you reach for and which ones quietly stop getting made because they don’t test well. You hit the targets. The spreadsheet looks great. And somewhere in the middle of all that winning, your business stops being built on its own story and starts being built in the reflection of somebody else’s signal.
AI is just the shinier, faster version of the same seduction. Point a powerful engine at your brand with nothing constitutional underneath it and it’ll happily generate a thousand on-trend variants that still somehow miss what makes you you. Not because the technology’s weak, but because there wasn’t anything of substance grounding it.
None of this is an argument against the tools. It’s an argument for having something the tools can’t provide. What survives when this one gets swapped for the next is whatever was a constant all along. The foundations.
And this matters more now than it did a few years ago, because trust has become so scarce. Nobody’s quite sure what’s real any more, brands say one thing and get caught doing another, the whole landscape’s a bit noisier and a bit less believable than it used to be. In a market like that, a business that can actually hold and defend a clear position stands out disproportionately, not because the model’s changed but because clarity itself has become rare. In a sea of movement the solid and static stands out. Everyone else is optimising. Fewer and fewer are standing for anything you could actually pin down. The thing the market is screaming for has been optimised away.
That’s the question I’m bringing to the SoDA: Society of Digital Agencies Global Summit in Prague this September, “What you’d still be if the tools disappeared?” It’s also the question my The Sharpened work exists to help agencies and brands answer.
More soon.